GPGPU.. 1

Introduction. 2

CPU vs. GPU.. 3

1.      Power. 3

2.      Cost. 3

3.      Aim.. 3

4.      Memory bandwidth. 4

5.      Float precision. 4

GPU Architecture. 5

1.      Stream processor. 5

2.      Memory organization. 6

GPGPU.. 8

1.      Definition. 8

2.      Implementations. 8

3.      Applications. 10

4.      Future. 11

Conclusion. 14

Bibliographies. 15

 

Introduction

Graphics processors have changed the last 10 years. Nowadays, they are able to do more than just render some vertex on screen. We will see first the difference between CPU and GPU. After, we will see how new graphics cards are architectured. Finally, we will see how to use graphics cards like a co-processor.

CPU vs. GPU

1.     Power

The power required for computer games and for 3d-modeling in general increase drastically since few years. This piece of silicon which was before optional is now one of the major part of the system. At the beginning, graphics cards were just here to help CPU on specific task, now they take more and more functionality.

This diagram shows the confrontation between CPU and GPU on floating point operations.

2.     Cost

The main market to graphic card reseller is video game player. He is the only market which can buy enough video card and which is ready to pay the same price a video card and a CPU.

It’s why the cost of GPU stays reasonably low.

GPU

8800 GTX

$514

GPU

ATI HD2900XT-PCIE

$420

GPU

NVIDIA GeForce FX 6800GT

$199

CPU

Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz Processor

$316

CPU

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz Processor

$224

 

The price is also a crucial element in the war. Why use SMP if my old graphic card could do better?

3.     Aim

A  CPU is expected to process a task as fast as possible whereas a GPU must be capable of processing a maximum of tasks on a large scale of data. The priority for the two is not the same, their respective architectures show that point.

GPU increase the number of processing units and the CPU develop control and expend his cache.

As we can see, GPU are highly parallel!

4.     Memory bandwidth

Memories are often a limited factor for a system. CPU try to remove this limitation by expending the size of cache memory.

 

Type

Speed

Nvidia

GDR3

83.2 Go/s

ATI

GDR4

128.0 Go/s

INTEL Core 2 duo

DDR2

6,4 Go/s

 

This trick doesn’t work if you work on a large amount of data. GPUs are faster memory certainly because new generation comes out every 6 months.

 

5.     Float precision

Accuracy is something really important for scientific problem.

 

Floating Point Precision

ATI GPU’s

64

Nvidia GPU’s

64 (32 on 8800)

Processor

128 (double on 64bits processors)

               

The future generation of GPU will exceed the accuracy of the CPU.


 

GPU Architecture

1.     Stream processor

The 8800 is composed by 128 stream processor turning at the frequency of 1350 MHz each. A processor is able to do an MAD and MUL calculation per clock cycle. They need 4 cycles for specials instructions like EXP, LOG, RCP, RSQ, SIN, COS managed by an extra unit.

  

Ati for the 2900XT chose another architecture. Instead using SIMD like Nvidia, they use MIMD 5-way. That means five instructions are dependant from each other. Each group of 5 processors has a special unit able to handle special instructions. A Radeon HD 2900 can handle 320 simple operations or 256 simple + 64 special ones. The frequency is 742 only MHz.

                These two architectures show the new tendency of constructor. Multiply the unit to do simpler calculus. Parallelize data at the maximum.

 

2.     Memory organization

GPU are capable of reading and writing anywhere in local memory (on the graphic card) or elsewhere (other parts of the system). These memories, however, are not cached, and the cost of the latency of reading/writing cycles for the GeForce 8800 oscillates between 200 and 300 cycles! This latency can be masked by the extremely long pipeline, if they don’t wait for a reading instruction.

 

http://www.behardware.com/medias/photos_news/00/19/IMG0019323.gif

 

To avoid as much as possible access to global memory, each multiprocessor has a small dedicated memory (16KB). They are called shared memory because memory can be used by other processors in the same block.

GPGPU

1.     Definition

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP²) is a recent trend focused on using GPUs to perform computations rather than the CPU. The addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines allowed software developers using GPUs for non graphics related applications. By exploiting GPU's extremely parallel architecture using stream processing approaches many real-time computing problems can be sped up considerably.

2.     Implementations

a.      How running code on GPU?

Vertex and pixel shader were added to graphics pipeline to produce more realistic effect. The specifications given by Microsoft increase the flexibility and capacity with each revision.

This is why you can nowadays run code on GPU!

b.      Brook

Brook for GPUs is a compiler and runtime implementation of the Brook stream program language for modern graphics hardware. Brook is an extension of standard ANSI C and is designed to incorporate the ideas of data parallel computing and arithmetic intensity. It is a cross platform language able to run on ATI and Nvidia, Linux and windows, DirextX and Opengl.

The main goal of this language is to make the programming easier. Try to not use Graphic functions and simply the common operation.

 

Stream processing is a new paradigm to maximize the efficiency of parallel computing. It can be decompose in two parts:

Stream: It’s a collection of objects which can be operated in parallel and which require the same computation.

Kernel: It’s a function applied on the entire stream, looks like a “for each” loop.

c.       CUDA, CTM

Nvidia and ATI approach differ on GPGPU.

Nvidia provide a fully SDK for a high layer programming. Concretely you write a C-like code and the Nvidia library take care of all the communication with the graphics card. They give libraries, comparator and specific driver.

Ati develops a low level interface call “close to metal”. Ati lets the developer community create the entire library and the high layer application. Actually, a middleware exists in Brook to use CTM. Maybe one day, one middleware will be creating between CUDA and CTM.

Both provide back end to run the code faster than graphics libraries on stream processors.

3.     Applications

We have already identified certain standards that we can carry to the GPU:

·         Linear algebra libraries like BLAS, ATLAS or LAPACK... 

·         Basic arithmetic

·         Trigonometry 

·         Transcendental functions 

·         Operations, identities and inversion of matrices

·          Resolution of equation systems of unknown N 

·         Calculation by finished elements  

·         Convolutions 

·         Generation of random numbers 

·         Linear algebra 

·         VaR computing 

·         Monte Carlo

Every application which need parallel computing can be a good application.

4.     Future

a.      Larabee

Intel wants to introduce into SSE4 some High Level Shading Language. That concretely means Intel plans to develop a GPU to do massive parallel computing.

The interesting thing is they want to keep the X86 instructions set!  Larabee could be exploited like GPU or like a Co-processor.

b.      AMD's Fusion

AMD plans to integrate GPU in the same die of CPU to reduce latency between the components.

We can now easily imagine a multi-core configuration where GPU will be either GPU or Co-processor.


 

Conclusion

                We have to keep in mind that GPUs evolve really fast. They have optimized to handle parallel data instead of CPU which are powerful to handle parallel tasks. Programming a GPU will become easier with time and the domain of application is wide.

Bibliographies

GPGPU

http://www.gpgpu.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU

http://download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/GPU_Gems2_ch29.pdf

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mhouston/public_talks/R520-mhouston.pdf

http://www.behardware.com/articles/659-4/nvidia-cuda-preview.html

http://www.behardware.com/articles/678-1/nvidia-cuda-practical-uses.html

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/

GPU Architecture

http://www.behardware.com/articles/671-2/ati-radeon-hd-2900-xt.html

http://www.behardware.com/articles/644-1/nvidia-geforce-8800-gtx-8800-gts.html

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2870&p=5

Other

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061119-8250.html

 

 

Glossary

http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/430/